Leap, one of the fastest-growing benefits solutions companies in the United States, is hiring a Founding Designer based in San Francisco, California. This is not a typical product design role. The person stepping into this position will define how patients and families experience Leap from the very first moment of contact.
Specialty drugs and infusions represent nearly 10% of all healthcare spend. Leap sits at the center of that challenge. Patients often hear from Leap during stressful, clinically serious moments. Design here carries real weight.
What the Founding Designer Role Actually Involves
Leap describes this as a rare design opportunity. The role spans strategy and execution. One day you may be mapping a patient journey. Another day you may be designing a campaign that earns trust in a matter of seconds.
The first priority is Member Growth. You will help create campaigns and member communications that introduce Leap clearly and make the next step feel obvious. Beyond campaigns, the mandate grows significantly larger.
You will shape how patients discover Leap, understand their treatment options, schedule care, prepare for infusions, and stay engaged over time. This is both a communications design role and a product experience role combined into one position.
Technical Skills Required for This Role
Visual and Communication Design
Strong visual design fundamentals are non-negotiable here. You need a solid command of typography, color, layout, and hierarchy. Leap communicates with patients during high-stakes moments. Every design decision affects whether someone takes action or feels more confused.
You should be proficient in Figma, the industry standard for interface and communication design. Familiarity with Adobe Creative Suite, particularly Illustrator and InDesign, strengthens your ability to handle print and digital campaign materials. Knowing both tools makes you far more versatile.
UX and Product Design
This role requires user experience design skills beyond surface-level aesthetics. You need to understand patient journeys, identify friction points, and design flows that reduce confusion. Healthcare users face high anxiety. Clarity in UX directly affects patient outcomes.
- Wireframing and prototyping
- User flow mapping and journey documentation
- Information architecture for complex healthcare content
- Usability testing and interpreting research findings
- Designing for accessibility standards including WCAG compliance
Accessibility is especially critical in healthcare design. Patients may be elderly, visually impaired, or navigating in a second language. Designing inclusively is not optional at a company serving diverse patient populations.
Campaign and Marketing Design
Member Growth is the immediate priority. Leap needs a designer who understands conversion-focused design. Email campaigns, landing pages, SMS communications, and printed materials all fall within scope. You need to know how design drives engagement at each touchpoint.
- Email template design for healthcare communications
- Landing page layout and conversion optimization
- Multi-channel campaign asset creation
- Brand system development from early-stage foundations
Because Leap is still building its visual identity at scale, experience creating or extending a brand system is a major advantage. You will likely help define the rules others follow later.
Motion and Digital Interaction
Basic motion design skills are increasingly expected at the founding designer level. You do not need to be an animator. However, understanding micro-interactions and how motion guides attention improves the patient experience significantly.
Soft Skills That Matter at Leap
Empathy for High-Stress Users
Deep empathy is perhaps the most critical soft skill for this role. Patients contacting Leap are often navigating a new diagnosis or an unfamiliar treatment. They may feel lost, scared, or overwhelmed by a healthcare system that has already failed them.
Your design decisions must reflect that reality. This means slowing down assumptions. It means listening carefully to Care Guides who speak with patients daily. Empathy here is not abstract. It directly shapes every design choice you make.
Strategic Thinking
Leap wants someone who moves fluidly between strategy and execution. Strategic design thinking means understanding why you are designing something, not just how. You need to ask what behavior a design should drive and what patient outcome it should support.
At an early-stage company, designers who only execute tasks quickly become a bottleneck. Leap needs someone who brings perspective to product decisions before pixels ever appear on a canvas.
Clear Communication
Founding designers present work to founders, operators, and clinical team members. Each audience thinks differently. Communicating design rationale clearly across those groups separates strong designers from great ones. You must be able to defend decisions without being defensive.
Comfort with Ambiguity
Leap is a fast-growing company redefining a complex category. Briefs will not always arrive fully formed. Priorities will shift. Thriving under ambiguity is not just helpful here. It is essential. The best founding designers create structure where none exists yet.
Collaboration and Cross-Functional Partnership
You will work alongside Care Guides, growth teams, clinical staff, and leadership. Each group brings different context. Building trust across functions quickly is a skill in itself. Strong collaborators ask better questions and ship better work faster.
Experience Leap Is Looking For
While the job posting does not list a rigid years-of-experience requirement, the scope of the role signals a clear expectation. Leap needs someone with substantial independent design experience. This is not a junior role.
Ideal candidates likely bring the following background:
- Prior experience at a startup or early-stage company as a lead or solo designer
- A portfolio that shows both product design and communication design work
- Experience designing for regulated or sensitive industries such as healthcare, fintech, or insurance
- Evidence of building or contributing to a design system from scratch
- Examples of patient-facing, customer-facing, or member-facing work that drove engagement
Healthcare industry experience is a meaningful differentiator. Designers who have worked in digital health, health insurance, or benefits platforms understand the regulatory tone, plain language standards, and trust-building mechanics that generic consumer design does not require.
How to Build the Skills This Role Requires
Strengthen Your Healthcare Design Knowledge
Study how leading digital health companies communicate with patients. Companies like Hims, Ro, and Oscar Health have published case studies and design teardowns worth analyzing. Pay attention to tone, layout simplicity, and how they handle sensitive topics.
Reading about plain language guidelines from government health agencies also builds practical knowledge. The CDC and NIH both publish writing standards that apply directly to patient communication design.
Build a Campaign and Product Design Portfolio
Practice designing multi-channel campaigns from scratch. Create a fictional healthcare brand and design its onboarding email series, landing page, and patient portal home screen. Showing range across campaign and product work signals the versatility Leap needs.
Learn Journey Mapping and Service Design
Take a course in service design or experience mapping. Platforms like IDEO U, Coursera, and Nielsen Norman Group all offer strong options. Journey mapping is a core skill for this role and one that designers from purely visual backgrounds often lack.
Practice Presenting Design Work
Record yourself walking through a design decision. Review how clearly you explain the why, not just the what. Founding designers present constantly. Practicing articulation of your design rationale is a skill built through repetition, not intuition.
Seek Early-Stage Company Experience
If you have worked only at large companies, consider taking on a contract role at a startup. The speed, ambiguity, and cross-functional intensity of early-stage work is genuinely different. Experiencing it before applying signals real readiness.
Designers who match this profile and want to shape how life-changing therapies reach patients can apply for the Founding Designer role at Leap directly through this link: https://remoteOK.com/remote-jobs/remote-founding-designer-leap-1133489
